Chapter 9 Tropical Caterpillar Addiction Annette Aiello It’s tempting to begin this account with “It was a dark and stormy” journey to the Lepidoptera, but I will resist. It’s true though that the path was a long and convo- luted one, with plenty of possibilities unrecognized and opportunities missed. I was born in 1941 in a large city, New York. We lived in Brooklyn, where the neighbors’ yard held the only nearby representative of the natural world, a magnifi- cent magnolia tree. The flowers and their perfume were the most wonderful things imaginable. I collected fallen petals in a shoe box and a few days later suffered a great disappointment when the petals turned brown. My earliest encounter with nature was my grandmother’s garden in Guilford, CT. It was simply gorgeous. On visits there, from toddler years on, I spent hours making the rounds of every plant in that garden. It had all the elements one might expect in a garden of that era: irises, lilies, roses, a rock garden with Opuntia cactus and Portulaca, Gaillardia, Hosta, love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena), mullein- pink (Silene coronaria), snowberry (Symphoricarpos albus), and nasturtium (Tro- paeolum majus); and of course, lots of butterflies. Children are naturally attracted to flowers and butterflies, and they feel a powerful urge to interact with them but don’t know how. I remember that “Don’t touch” frustration well (Fig. 9.1). In 1948, my family moved to Killingworth, CT, a rural town where houses were few and far between, and where I attended a one-room schoolhouse. Now we were surrounded by nature. Killingworth then was mostly woodland, abandoned fields, small streams, swamps, and cranberry bogs, and I explored these at every oppor- tunity, year round. I collected bird nests, shed snakeskins, rocks, and shells. And I raised and released baby birds that fell from their nests. In those days, before widespread light pollution and the rampant use of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), the windows on summer evenings were teeming with insects, especially large colorful moths. As with the magnolia petals, I felt compelled to collect them. Having no guidance as to procedures or equipment, I dispatched them with carbon A. Aiello () Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Ancon, Balboa, Republic of Panama e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 91 L. A. Dyer, M. L. Forister (eds.), The Lives of Lepidopterists, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-20457-4_9 [email protected] 92 A. Aiello Fig. 9.1 Don’t touch! The author conversing with flow- ers, July 1942, Guilford, CT tetrachloride and displayed them in windowed handkerchief boxes lined with milk- weed down. Of course, after a few years of labor by museum pests, the milkweed down was all that remained. During my early teen years, a neighbor took me along on Connecticut Botanical Society field trips. They were wonderful, but I didn’t know that one could study plants and animals in any formal way and make a career from something they liked to do. It took decades for me to figure that out. It was no help that high school biol- ogy was quite dull, except that I had a crush on the teacher. The course was taught entirely from a textbook with no laboratory sessions or field trips at all. If anyone had predicted then that I’d eventually do a PhD thesis in botany or go on to study insects, I would have said “Very funny.” On top of that, the results of a “general interest” survey administered in our senior year (1959) were interpreted to suggest that I take up a career as a flower arranger. I left home right after high school graduation and returned to New York City to study music. Once again I was severed from nature. I supported myself with a series of jobs: painting fingernails at a manikin factory in the garment district, working in a shoe factory in Greenwich Village, and coding questionnaires at the American Cancer Society. Later, I moved to New Orleans for a few years and worked in a department store’s accounting department and later was the jewelry-receiving clerk in Adler’s jewelry store, a truly fun job as one never knew what wonders a package would hold. On the music side, I sang in the local orchestra chorus and the opera chorus. Throughout my years in New Orleans, I was intrigued by the plants, insects, and birds there, [email protected] 9 Tropical Caterpillar Addiction 93 and though I passed the natural history museum on my bicycle ride to work every day, and though I thought of stopping in there to ask questions, I didn’t do it. The museum opened after my working hours began and closed before they ended. Why didn’t I call in sick and just go there? A combination of shyness and job responsibil- ity most likely. Among the opportunities missed, that one perhaps was the most lam- entable as it had the potential to point my life in the right direction almost instantly. On my return to New York, I worked at the Diner’s Club accounting office, then a feature news agency, and then Basic Systems Inc. (a now defunct subsidiary of the Xerox Corporation). Clearly, I needed to identify and focus on a meaningful career. But what? Why biology wasn’t obvious I’ll never know. A newspaper ad led me to the Germaine School of Photography, located in the basement of the Transportation Building in Lower Manhattan. The course was intensive, a 600-h curriculum cover- ing every aspect of commercial black and white photography. Mainly we used large format studio cameras—with 5″ × 7″ sheet film. We lugged them and their huge tri- pods around on public transportation to reach our various field assignments, which included the construction sites of the World Trade Center and Lincoln Center. When the course ended in May 1967, I got my first camera, a Nikon single-lens reflex. It was spring, and instead of continuing exclusively in black-and-white format, I found myself taking hundreds of photographs of plants and insects. I photographed weeds in abandoned lots and railroad beds in the Brooklyn Bridge area, and wild flowers and insects all over the place in Connecticut where mother drove me around on weekends. A Killingworth neighbor invited me to go botanizing. She told me about a book called Gray’s Manual of Botany that covered all the New England plants. I bought a copy and spent the next winter learning the terminology and try- ing to identify the plants in my photographs. It was beginning to sink in that biology could give my life meaning. Finally, at the age of 28, I realized it was time to go to college. I majored in biology at Brooklyn College, and then went on to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. My doctoral thesis took me to Jamaica and Mexico, and it was in Jamaica that insects began to attract me greatly. I was especially in- trigued by a treehopper (Membracidae) that had a colorful bubble-like projection which it threw off with a snapping sound when disturbed; I’ve never seen such a bi- zarre insect since. My guide in Jamaica was kind enough not to inform my Harvard advisor that I was collecting insects in addition to the thesis plants. In 1976, as I was finishing the thesis, unexpected life events diverted me to Barro Colorado Island (BCI) Panama (Fig. 9.2) for 6 months a year to collaborate on a butterfly project with Robert Silberglied, a Harvard professor in entomology. Until his death in early 1982, we spent each March–August in Panama studying the two commonest butterflies in the neotropics, Anartia fatima of Mexico and Central America, and Anartia amathea of South America. We learned that they hybridize in Panama’s Darien Province, towards the Colombian border (Fig. 9.3). Did they mate at random, or did they choose mates? What were the consequences of hybrid- ization? Why didn’t the two species spread into each other’s ranges? To investigate those and other questions, we raised hundreds of butterflies for mate choice tests. Our waking hours were consumed with capturing females and harvesting eggs from [email protected] 94 A. Aiello Fig. 9.2 Barro Colo- rado, Panama. Upper left: Approaching the dock from Gatun Lake. Lower left: Ascending the more than 100 steps from the dock to the Dining Hall and dormitory. Upper right: Barbour House, where we lived and con- ducted laboratory research. Lower right: The Herbarium, with a spider monkey and baby on roof them, collecting caterpillar food plant, feeding caterpillars, separating pupae as they formed, marking adults individually as they emerged from their pupae, feeding adults, running the mate choice experiments, and keeping meticulous records of every individual for several generations. The caterpillar food plant was an abundant weed, Blechum pyramidale of the family Acanthaceae. To feed so many caterpillars, we had to travel off-island and collect huge amounts of Blechum along roadsides and waste areas, about a dozen garbage bags full per week. The project was intense Fig. 9.3 Anartia fatima (left), FA hybrid (middle), Anartia amathea (right) (family Nymphalidae) [email protected] 9 Tropical Caterpillar Addiction 95 and unrelenting, and we were slaves to it, 18 h per day, 7 days a week. As each generation of caterpillars grew to their largest size and approached pupation, they became voracious and we nearly went crazy trying to keep up with feeding them and cleaning their little cages, which were made from window screen cylinders with Petri dish bottoms and covers, and which held 25 caterpillars apiece.